Center of Gravity (6 page)

Koenig executed a crisp salute. “Thank you, Fleet Admiral.”

Carruthers returned the salute. “Thank
you
, Admiral, from a grateful planet, a grateful Confederation.” And he shook Koenig’s hand.

Somehow, Koenig kept a straight face.
Bullshit
, he thought.

As Carruthers stepped back, Koenig looked out over the audience. They’d told him several million people would be watching from various parts of the Palisades Eudaimonium, and with as many as two billion watching from around Earth and near-Earth space. The ceremony would be rebroadcast across the entire Confederation once courier ships could carry it across the light years.

“This medal,” he said, tapping the device lightly, “rightfully belongs to the men and women of Carrier Battlegroup
America
, not me… .”

And the light beneath his feet winked out.

His image, however, remained huge within the cavernous Concourse, continuing to speak, to gesture.

“. . . and I am especially grateful to President Schneider and the august assembly of the Confederation Senate, whose support…”

Platitudes. Empty words.
Damn
them!

“Well done, Admiral,” Quintanilla said, stepping up to his side. A burst of wild cheering rose from the concourse floor, thousands of voices yelling, many chanting his name. “Your public adores you!”

“It adores my electronic puppet,” Koenig said, bitter.

“Now, I told you we’d have a PA step in for your speech. Military men rarely have the stomach for good speech making. Or the time, come to that.”

“I meant it.” He tapped the medal again. “This belongs to my people. They saved the planet. They earned it.”

Quintanilla shrugged. “Do what you want with it, Admiral. It’s just a trinket. But the public needs heroes, people whom it can look up to, whom it can admire. And you, like it or not, are that man.”

“Bullshit,” Koenig said.

The cheering continued from the floor below.

It was going to be a long damned party.

Chapter Three

21 December 2404

Palisades Eudaimonium

New York State, Earth

1804 hours, EST

Lieutenant Trevor Gray cheered and applauded with the rest of the crowd, but he wasn’t applauding the body of the speech. No, the Old Man had slipped out just one line at the very beginning, something about the medal belonging to the
America
battlegroup, before the faintest of flickers ran through the holographic image hovering overhead, and it began sounding like some empty-headed acceptance speech at the Virtual Reality Entertainment Awards night. “I’d like to thank the Senate… I’d like to thank the president of the Senate…”

Nah,
that
wasn’t the Old Man. Not his style at all. Every man and woman in the Fleet knew Admiral Koenig had exactly zero time and zero tolerance for glad-handing or for sycophantic public relations. That was an electronic agent up there, a personal assistant programmed to look and sound like Koenig reciting the holy party line.

The image continued speaking, but Gray had already tuned it out. He reached for another appetizer, a Ukrainian tidbit consisting of a sausage covered in chocolate.

“Trevor? . . .”

Something jumped and twisted inside him. Dropping the sausage, he turned.

Angela… .

“You!”

She was wearing a conservative evening dress for this crowd, a flowing white something aglow with light that changed colors as she moved.

“Hello, Trevor. It’s been a long time.”

He nodded, numb. In the background, Admiral Koenig’s image rambled on about duty and honor.

“What are you doing here?”

She gave him a thin smile. “I
live
here, remember? Or in Haworth, anyway. Just ten, twelve kilometers north of here. I think just about everybody in New New York came down to see the Yule ceremony tonight. Are you… are you stationed on Earth now?”

He shook his head, a curt, sharp negative. “I’m a fighter pilot assigned to the Star Carrier
America
. They brought me down for the flyby earlier.”

“Were
you
flying one of those things?”

“I was flying an SG–92 Starhawk, yeah.”

“They told me you were joining the service. I didn’t know you were a
pilot
.”

Yeah, you didn’t ask what had happened to me, did you?
he thought. The last time he’d seen her had been just before he’d been forced into military service in order to pay her hospital bill. He’d tried to look her up on several occasions after, while he’d still been in a training squadron at Oceana, but his e-calls had always been blocked.

“Are you still with Frank?”

“Fred.”

“Whatever.”

“I’m part of an extended family up in Haworth, yes.”

“Are you happy?”

“Yes.”

“Then that’s okay, then.”
Damn
, this felt awkward.

“How about you?”

“Me what?”

“Are you happy?”

He wondered how to reply. His life turned upside down, the woman he’d loved horribly changed and taken from him. He was forced to live and work with people who laughed at his old life and called him “Prim” and “squattie” and “monogie,” forced to leave the place that had been home since his birth… . Was he happy?

“Sure, I’m happy. A laugh a minute, that’s my life.”

She looked at him uncertainly, as if trying to decide if he was being sarcastic or bitter. He looked down at the palms of his hands, where slender gold, silver, and copper threads were woven in an uneven mesh imbedded in the skin, exactly like her implants. He’d had to get his when they inducted him into the Confederation Navy; all personnel had to have them in order to control everything from meal dispensers to the locks on their personal quarters to the cockpit instrumentation in an SG–92.

But Angela had gotten hers as a part of the treatment after her stroke, class-three implants within the sulci of her brain. They’d also regrown sections of her organic nervous system. And it had changed her, changed her attitude, her feelings toward him.

Of course, he still loved her, though she’d lost all affection for him.

“So,” he said, wondering what to talk about. “You just happened to be here? You weren’t looking for me?”

“No, Trev. I was just… here. Small world, huh?”

A little too small. Gray found himself wishing he were back on the
America
. Life on board ship was
so
much simpler.

But then, she
had
been pinging him. His PA confirmed that it had been her electronic signal seeking him out of the crowd. Maybe she was still interested in him after all.

“I’ve got to go,” he said sharply. He turned and walked away, leaving her standing there by the food table.

High Guard Destroyer
Qianfang Fangyu

Saturn Space, Sol System

1325 hours, TFT

“What the holy fuck is
that
?”

Jordan Reeves floated in the main control room of the High Guard destroyer, staring into the holographic display showing the long-range scan of the intruder.

Captain Liu Jintao glanced at the liaison officer with distaste, and then passed his hand across the display controls, increasing the magnification factor by another ten.

“I would say,” Liu replied in his slow and halting English, “that it is a problem.”

The target was some 20 million kilometers out from Saturn—and at just about the same distance from Titan at this point in the giant moon’s orbit. That actually placed the intruder well within the outskirts of Saturn’s far-flung system of moons, within the retrograde Norse group, in fact.

And that made the intruder of
supreme
interest to the High Guard.

Within the display, the intruder appeared as a gleaming point of light, attended by a flickering sidebar of data giving mass and diameter, velocity and heading. The ship—it had just dropped out of the space-twisting bubble of Alcubierre Drive so it
had
to be a ship—was huge, two kilometers across and massing tens of billions of tons. At optical wavelengths, the object appeared… odd, a flattened sphere with a shifting surface that defied analysis.

“It’s highly reflective,” Liu said.

“It’s
black
.”

“Because it is reflecting the black of surrounding space. This data suggests that it is almost perfectly reflective… like a mirror, or a pool of liquid mercury.”

“So who are they, and what are they doing in the Norse group?”

The Norse group was the outer cloud of Saturnian moons, some dozens of bodies circling the planet retrograde and at high inclination. Phoebe, at 216 kilometers, was the biggest of these; the rest, named for figures from Norse mythology, were rubble, little more than drifting mountains. Ymir was just 18 kilometers wide.

“Is he trying to rendezvous with any of those rocks?” Reeves asked.

“Not yet,” Liu replied. “The nearest to the intruder’s position is S/2004 S 12… at just over one hundred thousand kilometers. And the intruder is traveling prograde.”

The Norse group moons were retrograde, circling Saturn east to west. The intruder was currently flying against the flow, as it were, meaning it was not attempting to match course and velocity with any of those hurtling mountains.

Yet
.

Over two and a half centuries before, the Second Sino-Western War had been fought both on Earth and in space. Toward the very end of the conflict, a Chinese ship, the
Xiang Yang Hong
, had used nuclear warheads to nudge three two-kilometer asteroids into trajectories that would have landed them in the Atlantic Ocean, one right after the other; the resultant tidal waves would have devastated both the eastern seaboard of the United States and much of the European Union, as well as much of Africa and South America. Had the attempt succeeded, there was little doubt but that the Chinese Hegemony would have emerged, not merely victorious, but as the single most powerful nation on the planet.

Beijing had claimed that Sun Xueju, the
Xiang Yang Hong
’s captain, had gone rogue, that he’d been operating independently of Beijing’s orders when he’d attempted what amounted to a global terror attack. The attempt had come uncomfortably close to success; a U.S.-European task force had destroyed the
Xiang Yang Hong
and two of the incoming asteroids… but the last, dubbed “Wormwood” by the media, had slammed into the sea between West Africa and Brazil, and half a billion people had died.

The Chinese Hegemony had been shamed by Sun’s act, and had been paying for that event ever since, blocked from joining the Earth Confederation, savaged by trade and commerce laws imposed by foreign governments, regarded as second-class representatives of Humankind…

. . . not to mention being forced, Liu thought bitterly, to accept foreign political observers on board Hegemony military vessels.

The Earth Confederation had started off three centuries before as little more than a loose trade alliance, but immediately after the Second Chinese War it had become the planet’s
de facto
government. Under the Confederation’s guidance, the High Guard—originally an automated deep-space system designed to track asteroids that might one day pose a threat to Earth—had been expanded into a small, multinational navy.

The High Guard was similar to the seagoing coast guards of earlier eras, but patrolled the outer solar system in search of asteroids that might threaten a populated world… or renegade ships like the
Xiang Yang Hong
attempting to change the orbit of an asteroid in order to create a planet killer. The High Guard paid special attention to possible sources of planet killers—the Kuiper Belt, the main asteroid belt, and the tiny, outermost moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

“We should warn SupraQuito,” Reeves said.

“We sent off an alert twelve seconds after the intruder appeared on our displays,” Liu told him. “The time lag at this distance is seventy-six minutes. The question is, what do
we
do about that… craft?” He pulled down another display, checking the ship’s library. “The only vessel ever encountered even remotely similar to this one was in 2392, at 9 Ceti. The Turusch call them…” He hesitated at the awkward, difficult name. “Heh-rul-kah.”

“An enemy?”

“A single ship wiped out a small Confederation battlefleet.”

“That thing is two kilometers wide,” Reeves said, shaking his head. “Too big for us. I suggest we follow it, perhaps try to get a closer look… but take no action.”

“I fear you are right,” Liu said. He was reluctant to agree with the liaison officer, but the
Qianfang Fangyu
measured just 512 meters from mushroom prow to plasma drive venturis, and massed 9,300 tons. Unlike many of the Guard’s older, Marshall-class destroyers, she still had a primary ranged weapon—a spinal-mount mass driver—but that would be of little use in combat against something as massive as a H’rulka vessel 20 million kilometers away.

“Captain!” his radar officer called in
Gu¯anhuà
over his internal link. “The intruder is accelerating rapidly!”

Liu could see that for himself, as numbers on the display sidebar rapidly changed. The massive vessel was rapidly moving out of Saturn space.

It was moving sunward, toward the inner system.

“Helm!” Liu snapped. “Engage gravitics, five hundred gravities. Pursue the intruder!”

It would be like a mouse pursuing an ox. A
dangerous
ox. Liu wasn’t exactly sure what the
Qianfang Fangyu
could do if it actually caught the intruder, but they needed to pace it.

And to see to it that Earth was warned as quickly as possible.

But his oath as a High Guard officer—and his determination to see the ancient Middle Kingdom cleansed once and for all of the shame of the Wormwood Strike—made that pursuit imperative, no matter what the outcome.

The
Qianfang Fangyu
broke free from Titan orbit, accelerating toward a sun made tiny by distance.

Palisades Eudaimonium

New York State, Earth

1925 hours, EST

Admiral Koenig looked at Carruthers with surprise. “They’re doing
what
?”